During the Christmas holidays I spent some time trying to figure out if PlayStation 3 is any good for Scrypt proof of work used by litecoin. As a result, LTC mining performance went up from ~1 khash/s to something like ~34 khash/s. My patches for jgarzik/ArtForz cpuminer are available at GitHub: https://github.com/ssvb/cpuminer

Everything should build fine in Linux using the standard "./autogen.sh && ./configure && make" steps (the availability of libspe2 library and spu-elf-gcc/embedspu tools should be detected automatically by configure). Setting CFLAGS to the optimal settings "-O3 -mcpu=cell -mtune=cell -maltivec -fstrict-aliasing" before compilation provides best performance. Note: this miner requires linux to run on PS3. If you don't have linux, you can't use it.

Also these optimizations should improve performance on many other PowerPC hardware by using Altivec instructions. If everything goes well, the PowerPC optimizations may be potentially merged with pooler's miner in the future.

If you find any bugs, please let me know. And sorry for a short announcement, I'll try to add more information later.

During the Christmas holidays I spent some time trying to figure out if PlayStation 3 is any good for Scrypt proof of work used by litecoin. As a result, LTC mining performance went up from ~1 khash/s to something like ~34 khash/s. My patches for jgarzik/ArtForz cpuminer are available at GitHub: https://github.com/ssvb/cpuminer

Everything should build fine in Linux using the standard "./autogen.sh && ./configure && make" steps (the availability of libspe2 library and spu-elf-gcc/embedspu tools should be detected automatically by configure). Setting CFLAGS to the optimal settings "-O3 -mcpu=cell -mtune=cell -maltivec -fstrict-aliasing" before compilation provides best performance. Note: this miner requires linux to run on PS3. If you don't have linux, you can't use it.

Also these optimizations should improve performance on many other PowerPC hardware by using Altivec instructions. If everything goes well, the PowerPC optimizations may be potentially merged with pooler's miner in the future.

If you find any bugs, please let me know. And sorry for a short announcement, I'll try to add more information later.

PS3 mines at 34khps? That's quite a deal. If there's an easy way to install the miner onto the PS3, there may be millions of new users out there.

PS3 mines at 34khps? That's quite a deal. If there's an easy way to install the miner onto the PS3, there may be millions of new users out there.

The Cell/BE optimized miner requires Linux installation running on PS3, which was initially marketed by Sony as OtherOS feature. This feature was discontinued in newer PS3 Slim models and also removed from older PS3 consoles by firmware update despite the original promise to keep it. The users were given a free choice how to cripple their PS3 functionality: forfeit OtherOS or lose the ability to play new games. I myself opted for the latter option. I guess the majority of normal users interested in games made a different choice and there are hardly millions of new users to do LTC mining on PS3 as a result.

Also another side of this story is that such controversial actions from Sony encouraged a lot of hackers to break PS3 protection and recover OtherOS and even enable OtherOS on PS3 Slim at some point by using modified firmware. That's a cat and mouse game between Sony and hackers, but I'm not really tracking the news from this front. After all, my PS3 still has OtherOS supported via an old version of the official firmware. Still on a technical side, the miner should also work fine with the OtherOS from unofficial modified firmware variants developed by hackers.

Wow I was discouraged by the 3 kh/s my i7 can do, if we can pump up some real numbers, I think Litecoin has a future! I just bought nearly 2000 LTC's for 2 BTC's on BTC-E, we'll see if I look back at this post in a years' time and if that was a good decision.

Nowadays i7 is also not so bad at LTC mining thanks to the SSE2 optimizations done by pooler. BTW, I have bought some cheap power meter and added the data about my hardware to the Mining hardware comparison wiki page. This also includes my Intel Core i7 860 computer, which is able to do at least 25 khash/s. Still I would prefer to keep discussion focused on mining using PowerPC and PlaySatation3 hardware in this topic

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if we can pump up some real numbers, I think Litecoin has a future! I just bought nearly 2000 LTC's for 2 BTC's on BTC-E, we'll see if I look back at this post in a years' time and if that was a good decision.

If everyone uses the best optimizations in miners, then you don't have any real advantage over the others. But it's good when the force is in balance This prevents the scenario when some bad guy keeps an optimized miner for himself and uses it together with some botnet for an extra advantage when attacking the network.

Ahh see this is where I failed, and I'm glad I came to realize it before I wasted too much more time. I had tried getting the miner to work outside of the litecoinpool browser miner and after a few failed attempts, I gave up. I guess it was just a bit of wasted electricity mining with the browser. I'm just going to buy LTC's, let you guys mine them.

Still I would prefer to keep discussion focused on mining using PowerPC and PlaySatation3 hardware in this topic

Agreed, sorry about the lite-threadbomb. Definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one, I'm excited to see high numbers with the Cell processor. There's a lot of PS3 clusters out there, and although it might not be profitable to run them today, in the future you might be able to pick them up for cheap and put them to work.

As i read this today i started to try it out on my old iBook G4 running Debian.

Thanks for posting your feedback, you are welcome here.

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I got only 0.02 kh/s with your version.For poolers miner i got somewhere at 0.7

This looks really strange. Even without the use of Altivec (SIMD instructions on PowerPC), the results should be maybe at most 20-30% slower than pooler's. But with the use of Altivec it should be several times faster.

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As i'm not familiar to what the cflags do could you please help me figure out what to do?

Hm i did as you told me but got nearly the same result. Now i'm at 0.04kh/s

If it's too complicated/time-consuming for you to look into it i understand as i think nearly nobody has G4 hardware anymore (especially running Debian instead of OsX i think but i lost the Installation CD and it felt boring slow with 10.3 ) but if you are interested i'll keep on testing

Thanks for providing the log. The "gcc: unrecognized option '-03'" error message explains everything. We want -O3 option, written as "minus big-o three" and not "minus zero three" (which means 'O'ptimization level '3'). And because the compiler does not recognize the invalid -03 option, all the optimizations get disabled completely and the performance is totally screwed up. Copy/paste is safer than typing

I have access to a pair of PowerMac G5 machines. I don't know the specific model(s) yet, but I found out that Ubuntu 11.10 will run on them with a little effort. I'll be trying to install a persistent USB build for them and get them running.

Once I have done that, and installed a few libraries and tools, I'll download and try to build pooler's most up-to-date/optimized miner. If that fails, I'll download an run the one mentioned here.

I have access to a pair of PowerMac G5 machines. I don't know the specific model(s) yet, but I found out that Ubuntu 11.10 will run on them with a little effort. I'll be trying to install a persistent USB build for them and get them running.

Once I have done that, and installed a few libraries and tools, I'll download and try to build pooler's most up-to-date/optimized miner. If that fails, I'll download an run the one mentioned here.

Cheers,

- Zed

I think pooler's optimized miner is optimized especially for Intel processors. You'll probably have more kh/s with the one from ssvb.

I think pooler's optimized miner is optimized especially for Intel processors. You'll probably have more kh/s with the one from ssvb.

More specifically it is x86 instruction set optimized assembly code something that will never apply to a PPC machine.

You are both right, re: pooler's optimizations. I was thinking just about the hash rate increases, and not that the optimizations are Intel and now AMD specific. I still have the G5 machines, but have had no time to do anything since I posted that message on 3-Jan. Hopefully I can burn a few cycles this weekend and get the machines running, although the fans on those suckers are fscking loud. Even the two IBM X3650M2s I had running over the holidays weren't as loud as just one of the PowerMac G5s ...